Raven's P•O•V

I woke up with a gasp and sat up suddenly. I looked around and felt at ease a little bit. I instantly realized I must have dozed off in Piper's room.

I sat over the edge of the bed and stood. I glanced down at my palm and sighed when I saw the clear, injury-free skin look up at me. I clenched my palm into a fist and walked out of Piper's room, trying carefully not to step on clothes.

Once I was out of the door I was faced with the large hall that Piper and I had walked briefly through as she led me to her room. I knew that the room I first woke up in after getting kidnapped was down the hall and I should go to the left. Yet, for a curious person such as myself, a magnificent place like this was not to go unexplored.

I went down the hall, getting further away from Piper's room, and found myself at the end of the hall where it turned into two more halls. One was to the left, and one was to the right. I decided to go with my gut and went left.

I kept going down the hall until I found myself faced with self-portraits and family pictures all staring down at me. Well... Assuming that they all were staring at anything at all.

I stared in awe and found myself turning in circles slowly, as I studied the intricate paintings of the romantic-style portraits. All obviously painted by artists of the past centuries.

The man and woman in the painting were painted with such detail I swear the painter even made sure to detail everything down to the sharp cuts in the gems of their crowns. They both had a baby in their arms as they stared into nothingness. I could almost see the flecks in both the babies' eyes as I got closer. I touched the frame softly and felt a wave of fascination hit me.

When I turned away from the painting, I was faced with the opposite wall filled with pictures. One caught my eye and I stepped up to it slowly, not believing my eyes.

Alec and DeMalo stood together, both looking no older than eighteen. But their age wasn't what shocked me. What shocked me was the age of the picture. There was no way this picture could've been taken anytime recently. The picture was something you'd expect to see in an antiquities store. The black and white format and stiff poses the two held gave it away. I took a step closer to the large photo and peered up at it.

The clicking of heels against the intricately tiled hall caught my attention. I gasped and was faced with a man and woman staring at me.

"Oh," I heard a woman gasp from down the hall. I snapped my gaze back and forth to the man and woman and felt a jolt of disbelief hit me.

They were the two from the painting. Although today she was dressed in a floor-length, red velvet dress with long, off-the-shoulder sleeves. The red darkness of the dress made her ghostly white complexion more prominent. Her hair was pitch black like Piper's and Alec's, and her eyes were a gleaming garnet red. That's when I realized she had to have been their mother.

She looked nearly forty, although in the portrait she looked late-thirties. Beside her was the man from the portrait as well. His dark brown hair was almost black and he looked eerily like an older version of DeMalo.

I turned fully to face them as they came closer to me.

"You must be the girl Alec was talking about," The woman observed, her voice thick with an elegant Romanian accent. She was quite tall and her beauty was intimidating, to say the least.

"You're so... mortal," She looked over me with fascination, her eyes raking over my features. I gulped as she said that. It wasn't the compliment I was expecting.

"Excuse me?" I asked, deeply confused and more just surprised at her comment. I didn't mean to say it rudely.

The man beside her just looked at me like he was inspecting a statue at a museum. The intense and almost intimidating gaze he held on me reminded me so much of DeMalo. I flicked my eyes away from him quickly.

"I'm sorry dear, please excuse me. My name is Irina Gheata and this is my husband Dimitri, Alec's parents," The woman apologized, her introduction confirming my first thought. For a second I felt myself ease a little bit, finding her kindness just as compelling as Piper's.

"Raven," I muttered my name awkwardly, feebly introducing myself, not knowing what else to say. She smiled and looked at the picture I was looking at.

"I see you found our portrait hall," Irina said and stepped up to the picture of her sons.

"Portrait hall?" I asked.

"Yes. This hall holds the portraits and photos of the whole Gheata family," She explained to me. I nodded and looked back at Alec and DeMalo's framed photo.

"They were quite young when this photo was taken. I remember Alec and DeMalo had just aged to eighteen," Irina told me and looked up to see their still faces. I looked up, too, in awe of their youth.

"What year was this taken?" I asked curiously, looking up into Alec's stagnant eyes that stared blankly.

"1937, a month after DeMalo aged," She said and I nodded, taking in how old Alec and DeMalo had to have been by now. Yet, they only look a couple of years older now than they did in 1937.

I turned and looked back at the portrait by Van Gogh.

"And this one?" I asked and walked over to it. Irina was beside me as she looked over it.

"Ah, this one was painted in 1874. A year after Alec and DeMalo were born. Dimitri and I had just been crowned," She told me as we looked at the painting.

I nodded stiffly, trying to take it all in that she had to have been more than four hundred years old. Irina must have sensed my uneasiness because she turned to Dimitri and put a hand on his shoulder gently.

"Please leave us, Dimitri. I think maintenance is going to need an idea of the setup for the tables," She inquired and he just nodded. He gave her a light kiss on the cheek before walking down the hall and disappearing into another connecting hall.

"I know it must be hard taking this all in, Raven. It's just meant to be," Irina now spoke to me. I faced her and furrowed my brows.

"How is this meant to be? Fate is supposed to happen. I don't think getting taken is Fate if that's what you mean by, 'it's meant to be,'" I said to her, letting the words come out harshly. She just smiled gently and didn't let the hostility turn her kindness into anger.

"I was you once," Her voice was serious, but it held a tone that was comforting. Before I could ask what she meant, she kept speaking,

"I was taken from my village in northern Romania four hundred and fifty-eight years ago. Unlike you, I was only fifteen at the time. Dimitri chose me and took me from my family. Back then, this happened all the time in Romania. Being taken was an honor to your family and your village because myth had spread that if you were taken, you were given riches and lived in a kingdom for the rest of eternity," She told her story, not looking at me anymore but was looking at the portrait of her with her husband and sons.

Finally, she looked back at me and for a second I thought I almost saw the slightest shine in her eyes from tears.

Her hurt had faded over the many years, the same hurt I felt now. It no longer hurt her as much as mine did. The raw wound of being ripped out of your old life and forced into a new one.

"But I fell in love with him and that's all that counts, right?" She said to me with a smile. I returned a small smile, not knowing what else to do.

"Yeah... I guess it does," I lied, letting her wound heal.

In my mind, I still couldn't think of a thing that could heal me from being kidnapped. Not a single material object, not a person, not even wealth could take away the burning pain that filled me as I thought about my life and how it's all been smashed to bits.

People kiss wounds in a way to show that love can take away the hurt. As kids, we were taught that a kiss could heal the pain we felt from scraping our hands on the cement, or the scratch we got from falling on the playground.

But as I thought about it, my wound was on the inside. It didn't bleed, but it hurt. But this hurt was different because not even love could heal a wound like this. Not the way Irina believed it would. And I knew that to be true.

♱

Irina and I spent the whole day touring the castle as she told me the history of everything in it. She went from telling me about the paintings to telling me where one stairway lead and which hallway was which. It was a lot to process. It felt like trying to memorize a map and listen intently to the history or stories Irina had about her children. It was quite hard if you asked me.

She had told me more about the whole vampire royal family thing as we walked. I had learned more about Alec, which she seemed to talk about him a lot. It must have been the whole soulmate thing where she thought she had to tell me all about him. But - as much as I wanted to - I kept myself from interrupting her and I let her continue to talk about him.

"I can't believe he's aging. I mean, I know he'll look pretty much the same, but the thought of him aging into an adult vampire... It just kills me to see him be a man and not just my child," Irina sighed as we had stopped in front of a huge window. Outside I could see a huge stable and pasture with autumn trees sharing their warm colors of red, orange, and yellow.

I spotted Alec out in the sun, brushing one of the beautiful, immense horses. His shirt was draped over the fence as he stood in the sun with leaves falling slowly on the windless day. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Irina watched her son lovingly.

"So it's not true," I murmured more to myself as I watched Alec stand unsheltered from the sun, letting the rays shine down on him. His pale skin almost shone as the sun seemed to barely phase him.

"What's not true?" Irina asked and continued to look out at the horses grazing in the nicely kept pasture.

"The sun. It doesn't affect you?" I asked, not taking my eyes away from the beautiful scene of Fall.

"Some myths just go out of proportion. Things unseen are vulnerable to people altering the truth about them. It's one thing people have done when they strayed away from Romania and took stories with them," Irina clarified, with a tremor in her voice. I looked at her out of the corner of my eye and saw her smiling now.

She scoffed at Alec with a smile on her face. I looked back to where he was and saw him facing the horse. The horse bowed its head down and pushed its face into Alec's shoulder. Alec rubbed his hands down the horse's neck and brushed out its mane with his fingers.

"They love him. I don't know how he does it. The kingdom has always had horses on the grounds for transportation, but they've always been so skittish around our kind. It's like they know we aren't human. Not fully anyway..." Irina told me. "As a kid, he had all the time in the world to chase them around the pasture and take care of them. But as he's gotten older it's harder for him to make time. So he trained the horses to trust him. He's even gotten them to trust the men who work in the stables. It's incredible."

My face was close to the window as I watched the horse take carrots from his hand. It snuck around behind Alec and nipped at his hair playfully. I could see Alec laugh and let the stallion chase him around. Alec weaved through the other horses as the horse chased him around. Alec stopped and turned to the horse with a big smile on his face. Pressing his forehead against the animal's, he pats its cheek and started walking back to the stables. The horse gladly followed behind him without being led and they both disappeared into the big stable doors.

I pressed my fingertips against the cool glass and felt guilt lace through me, tugging at my nerves. For a second I thought I even felt regret. Seeing my captor out with the horses was like seeing a glimpse of humanity in a person who was thought to be horrible. It was a different side of someone, almost like seeing their shadow.

I swallowed hard and let out a breath. Everything was so confusing. Everything was so new to me. It was like adjusting to new glasses. I was seeing things differently because after being taken, it was like the twenty years of my life on this earth had just been erased, and all that was left was a distant memory of the life I would never see again.

😘